Madonna and Me (34 page)

Emily Nussbaum

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN MADONNA CLIMBS out of the shining water in
Desperately Seeking Susan,
the audience gasps. At this recent late-night showing at 92YTribeca, the 1985 comedy holds up remarkably well—there’s all that East Village New Wave energy, those dizzy scenes in Battery Park, the whole notion of New York as a machine that makes you more interesting the minute you enter Port Authority. But really, it’s all about Madonna, squishing poor Rosanna Arquette right out of the picture. With her Italian nose and that jutting jaw and the baby-Elvis air of manipulation, Madonna is at once recognizable and something we haven’t seen in years. She’s a human wink.

Afterward, in the bathroom of 92YTribeca, I notice three girls from the front row. They’d been sitting dead center, but even from the back, they looked like the kind of people who knew they were attracting attention: a pale girl in black braids and a white eyelet dress, a tomboy in an oversize gold lamé baseball hat, the third in a bright orange romper. They are all in their twenties, they explain,
coworkers at the same clothing store in Brooklyn. And in a chorus of enthusiasm, they gush over the Madonna of the movie, who is the reason they’ve come, their role model, their inspiration—even back in high school, which was not so long ago.

“She’s so incredible!” they say. “So badass!”

One tells me dreamily that Madonna reminds them of the character Rayanne on
My So-Called Life,
another bad-girl catalyst—that special person who will bully us into becoming not better, exactly, but more exciting, with stories to tell. Yet when I ask what they think of Madonna today, they look uncomfortable and glance in unison away from me and into the mirrors.

“Now it’s like, what do we have in common—?”

“I mean, she’s twenty-six in this movie. She’s a very hip fifty-year-old, but now it’s just for show . . .”

Everything about the current Madonna makes them uncomfortable: the Kabbalah, the adoptions, the British accent. But they don’t want to betray her. Maybe she couldn’t always be “the girl you saw on Second Avenue.” The plastic surgery troubles them the most, but then Orange Romper blurts out aggressively: “Hey, I’d do the same thing! I’d get surgery and Botox and . . .” She looks at her friends with a pugnacious air: “When you’re that big a star, would you want everyone to see you that way, old and saggy, a has-been? What else could she do? Wouldn’t you do it, too?”

Madonna has returned to New York.

This makes a strange kind of sense.

After all, Madonna Louise Ciccone’s original arrival here, seven years before
Desperately Seeking Susan,
has long been one of Manhattan’s primal myths. She was that brassy, motherless nineteen-year-old dance major from Michigan—the busty one with the unshaved armpits—who asked a cab driver to drop her where the action was. That was Times Square, late summer 1978. She jumped from the dance world to Danceteria, from the Russian Tea Room coat check to nude modeling, spending four years seducing and abandoning DJs,
agents, and artists, impatiently waiting to become the famous person she clearly knew herself to be already. Terrible things happened to her (early on, a stranger forced her up to a tenement roof at knife-point and raped her), but that didn’t sap her ambition, it fueled her: She kept snapping up influences like a magnet, pursuing a modern style of fame that was as much about her own charisma as about anything she created.

In those early years, with the rubber bangles and huge crucifixes hanging off her like bell tongues, Madonna was paired in the public imagination with Michael Jackson. For a while, they were twin MTV phenomena, each with an outsize, candy-cartoon quality, dancers as much as they were singers, crossing lines of race and sexuality (they even had that weird publicity date at the 1991 Academy Awards). But unlike Jackson, Madonna was no child star. She’d built herself; and while Michael Jackson’s image was vulnerability, hers was proud control. She rejected the idea of being a victim, almost to a fault. Over the years, this vision of discipline as transcendence crackled, hardened, becoming at once awesome and alienating, creating a riddle for fans: How to reconcile that early Madonna with what she’d become?

Because now Madonna is back in Manhattan and, according to the gossip press, very busy: divorcing, adopting, hypnotizing baseball stars out of their marriages with Kabbalah, dangling Latino boy toys, occupying an uptown mansion and “shocking” people with bunny-eared fashion statements. I want to feel happy about this, since I am the kind of fool who gets excited by stars inhabiting my city. But instead, I feel unnerved, unsettled—thrown off by the Madonna who slouches toward the Upper East Side to be (for the thousandth time) reborn.

Now, bear in mind, for many years I adored Madonna, defended her to strangers—I was a fan, if not quite a wannabe. I graduated from high school the year Madonna exploded, and even in that initial incarnation it was clear that the woman was going to be a living
collect-them-all doll collection. She seemed to shoot out new selves every six months—from Jellybean Benitez Madonna to Madonna of the Boy-Toy Belt, Unshaved Leaked Photos Madonna, Madonna masturbating on a wedding cake, bouncing beside the waves in “Cherish,” dancing with the little boy in “Open Your Heart,”
Who’s That Girl
Eyebrows Madonna, Ideal Brunette Madonna (my favorite) saving Black Jesus in that incredible slip, Banned by the Pope! Madonna, “Vogue” Madonna, Fritz Lang Madonna, Wrapped-Plastic
Sex
-Book Madonna, Shame-Free BDSM Madonna, Sandra Bernhard–BFF Madonna, Bratty Letterman-Taunting Madonna, Self-Mocking
Wayne’s World
Madonna, the Madonna Who Ate Your Exotic Culture (“Vogue,” “Rain,” “La Isla Bonita”), Abused Sean Penn Madonna of the Helicopters, Contrarian I’m Gonna Keep My Baby Teen-Slut Madonna, Secretly Pregnant While Filming
Evita
Madonna, Underappreciated
Dick Tracy
/Sondheim Madonna, Water-Bottle-Fellating
Truth or Dare
Madonna (with Warren Beatty accessory), Bad Actress Madonna (Wax-Coated/Mamet), Momma Madonna, Kabbalah Esther, British Madge, and on and on.

For years, Madonna felt like a slippery, elegant key to all feminine mythologies, a shape-shifter inspiring to any young girl (or anyone) who felt her shape shifting. In high school, I was friends with a Madonna wannabe, a girl who jumped right on the underwear-as-outerwear phenomenon. At a party, she confided in me about kissing strangers: She loved that BOY TOY belt Madonna wore—she got the humor of it, the wink. For so many women I knew, she was a living permission slip, suggesting not bravery, exactly, but something more accessible: bravado.

Besides, her music was fun to dance to and she fit nicely with a lot of things I liked, like third-wave feminism and reclaiming words like
slut
and
queer
. Half her songs were about orgasm (“Borderline,” “Like a Virgin”), way before Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga. And she had an intriguing ability to inspire startling hostility and contempt in men. One hippieish boyfriend hated her but couldn’t say why,
almost stuttering as he tried to explain: She seemed to be taunting him, he decided. A male friend who did like Madonna told me he felt required to have sex with her if asked: “It would be like being seduced by PepsiCo.” (He meant this as a compliment.)

I enjoyed mouthing off in her defense right through the whole plastic-wrapped
Sex
-book period, until suddenly, somewhere in the late nineties, something bad started happening to my beloved multiple Madonnas, and my loyalty was severely tested.

The first shock was the morning I flipped through her children’s book
The English Roses
in the now-closed Astor Place Barnes & Noble.
The English Roses
was the story of a sweet and perfect girl, Binah, picked on by a clique of jealous conformists. Then a fairy visits them and they discover that Binah is not merely prettier, but also kinder, simply better in every way, and they are ashamed when they peer through her window, only to discover that (a) she had no mother, and (b) she worked very, very hard.